All News is Local — Something you already know about Google News is that we crawl thousands of sources from around the world. This means you get as many different perspectives on a story from many perspectives. A while back, we started thinking about how to bring this same diversity …

Look Out Topix - Google Launches Localized News Service — Topix has made a name by aggregating tens of thousands of local news sources and aggregating them online (they also like citizen journalists). It was only a matter of time before Google expanded their news product to compete more directly with Topix.

Welcome to the Neighborhood, Google — Gulp. — Silicon Valley CEO nightmare right out of central casting, right? In our case, Google launching a local news product that is targeted down to the ZIP code level, something we've had a lock on since 2004, and one of our clearest differentiators.

OpenID Welcomes Microsoft, Google, Verisign and IBM — As anticipated by TechCrunch UK in early January, OpenID is welcoming some big new partners to the club - Microsoft, Google, Verisign and IBM (TechCrunch UK anticipated all but Microsoft). — Google has been dabbling with OpenID …

Evolving the OpenID Foundation Board — This morning the OpenID Foundation announced that Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign, and Yahoo! have joined the board. The OpenID Foundation was formed in early 2006 by seven community members with the goal of helping promote, protect and enabling the OpenID technologies and community.

The Evolution of Tech Companies Logos — You've seen these tech logos everywhere, but have you ever wondered how they came to be? Did you know that Apple's original logo was Isaac Newton under an apple tree? Or that Nokia's original logo was a fish? — Let's take a look at the origin …

AdCamo Offers Background Advertising: Hmmmm — AdCamo is billed as the first and only background advertising network. — The concept is simple, like any ad network you sign up and display ads, but along with a banner the advertiser also gets to post their image(s) on your sites background as well.

Why Google's unstoppable — Microsoft is trying to buy Yahoo because it believes online advertising will be a much bigger business than it is today, and it wants to have a piece of the pie. Yahoo has a massive number of users, and the second-largest share of Internet searches.

IBM shrinks Cell to 45nm. Cheaper PS3s will follow — SAN FRANCISCO — At an ISSCC session yesterday afternoon, IBM announced details of a smaller, lower-power version of the Cell BE processor that powers Sony's PlayStation 3. The Cell BE is currently fabricated on IBM's 65nm SOI process …

Expertise Knows No Bounds — I opened an email this morning that started like this: … That's as far as I got. I replied with incredulity and moved on. — I am the first to admit that Silicon Valley has the largest concentration of web entrepreneurs, web developers, and web financiers of anywhere in the world.

CIA Monitors YouTube For Intelligence — U.S. spies are looking increasingly online for intelligence and they've become major consumers of social media. — In keeping with its mandate to gather intelligence, the CIA is watching YouTube. — U.S. spies, now under the Director of National Intelligence …

Microsoft Acquisition news — Following on December's announcement that the UK's Multimap is now part of Microsoft, I'm really excited to share the news that the Virtual Earth team has grown once again. This time in the field of 3D modeling and animation.

The Top 5 Reasons Nokia Should Bid On Yahoo — The entire tech universe is obsessed with Microsoft's attempt to take over Yahoo. The market has been waiting for this move for the last year, so most of the “analysis” coming from bloggers and industry pundits is well-rehearsed and polished, but hardly thought-provoking.